Mikulas Fabry

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

The Right to Democracy in International Law: A Classical Liberal Reassessment

The end of the cold war brought with it arguments in favour of international institutional and legal mechanisms that would protect democracy worldwide. These arguments have by no means been confined to the academic departments of international law or political science: in the aftermath of extensive democratisation in the 1980s and early 1990s, a growing number of global and regional organisations have, in fact, come to regard democracy as the only acceptable system of domestic rule within their domains and sought to implement measures to delegitimise non-democratic regimes as well as to defend democratic regimes against major internal threats. This article questions this trend. Drawing on the classical liberal approach to international relations, it argues that democracy, as a system of domestic government, must ultimately be the choice and responsibility of those who live within its bounds, and not of outside governments or institutions.

The contemporary practice of state recognition: Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and their aftermath

This paper assesses state recognition, the practice historically employed to regulate membership in international society, since the United States–led recognition of Kosovo and the Russian-led recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Its main goal is to succinctly examine the question of whether these two controversial episodes have signaled change in the existing norms of recognition of new states. The paper argues that there is not enough evidence for the claims of some observers and governments that unilateral secession is, as such, becoming legitimate internationally. The leading recognizing powers took great care in all three cases to reject the applicability of their decision to other situations of unilateral secession, and they have since approached those other situations as if no acknowledgment of the three territories had taken place. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the deeply contested nature of these cases has introduced confusion and uncertainty into the practice and that this has had, and will have, important implications elsewhere in the world, in terms of both re-invigorated claims of statehood and the potential for unilateral recognition decisions by powerful outsiders. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that Russias recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008 would have ever occurred without the prior US-led recognition of Kosovo in February 2008.

International Norms of Territorial Integrity and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s

This essay investigates the role of the post-1945 norms, rules and practices pertaining to state recognition of territorial claims in the bloodiest series of con ̄ icts in post-1945 Europe, the Balkan wars of the last decade. These moral and legal normsÐ Robert Jackson and Mark Zacher evocatively call them `̀ the territorial covenant’’ , and Zacher, more recently, `̀ the territorial integrity normÐ stipulate that territorial change attained through the use of military force cannot be accepted by the society of states as valid. They outlaw `̀ the acquiring of the right of sovereignty by victory’’ , as Thomas Hobbes de® ned conquest in Leviathan, and permit only territorial modi® cations attained by way of consent of all parties involved. The same applies to non-sovereign jurisdictions that become sovereign: unless their governments decide otherwise, their former administrative borders must remain intact. I suggest that territorial norms had a signi® cant presence in external attitudes towards the Yugoslav wars and their possible settlements and that the actual international decisions with respect to the Balkans were by and large consistent with these norms. There are two types of territorial norms: (1) those concerning the right to statehood (territorial constitutive norms) and (2) those relating to alteration of state frontiers (territorial regulative norms). Territorial constitutive norms lay down how a state may come into being or cease to exist, what entity can be a legitimate claimant of sovereign statehood, and in what borders can a new state be recognised as sovereign. Territorial regulative norms spell out modus operandi for changing title to a particular territorial segment between already established states. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina both types of norms were relevant, in Kosovo only the former.

The Right to Self-determination as a Claim to Independence in International Practice

Abstract This paper examines responses of states and intergovernmental organizations to the claims of independent statehood grounded in the right to self-determination. Virtually all assertions of independence invoke this right and it is highly probable that this long-standing global trend will continue. At the same time, only a relatively limited number of them are supported externally, either in the form of widespread public endorsement or outright recognition of a new state. This paper argues that there has been a clear prevailing international practice for more than five decades. On the one hand, international society has accepted self-determination claims to independence put forward by colonies and by non-colonial entities that obtained assent of their parent states. On the other hand, it has opposed claims set forth by non-colonial entities against the will of their parent states unilaterally. However, countries have been unable to maintain complete consistency and, in recent years, great powers found themselves at profound odds over a number of cases. These differences have led, and have a future potential to lead, to various forms of international conflict.

Unrecognized States and National Identity

What is the effect of being an unrecognized state on the national identity of its population? And how does it compare to the identity effect of having been accorded state recognition? This contribution argues that contrary to socio-psychological theories that make identity dependent on outside recognition, refusals of state recognition have, in general, a far stronger affirmative impact on national identity than extensions of it. Recognition may be the central external goal of claimants of statehood, but non-recognition fosters national identity to a much greater degree than recognition. While foreign recognition of statehood may fulfil a deep psychological need, it is its denial that makes a people’s collective sense of who they are more robust. Obtaining recognition as a state may, in fact, reveal the fragility of national identity within that state.

The Inter-American Democratic Charter and Governmental Legitimacy in the International Relations of the Western Hemisphere

The adoption of the Inter-American Democratic Charter by the Organization of American States in 2001 proclaiming the right to democracy in the western hemisphere was hailed by many as a landmark development. Since then, however, constitutionally dubious transitions of democratically elected governments were attempted or took place in Venezuela, Haiti, and Ecuador. This paper examines whether the Charter can and should serve as the institutional guarantor of democratic legitimacy in the Americas. Its conclusions are skeptical. As an external instrument, the Charter is bound to have limited impact when government control or authority is subjected to significant domestic disruptions. The Charters limitations do not lie with the document itself; rather they are inherent in the structure of the international states system. But the Charters normative basis would be problematic even if these structural limitations did not exist. Taking its cue from the classical liberal approach to international relations, the paper argues that democracy must ultimately be the choice and responsibility of those who live within its bounds, and not of outside governments or institutions.

Whose International Law? Legal Clashes in the Ukrainian Crisis

This chapter examines the role of international law in the Ukrainian crisis. It demonstrates that the United States and the European Union (EU), which have led global opposition to Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, have held uniform views on major international legal issues raised by that involvement. This unified stance suggests that the transatlantic zone is where shared basic values and principles of a global order do not exist only as a matter of abstract rhetorical agreement but also get translated into concrete policies and are applied to concrete cases. These policies must be acknowledged and probed no less than the fractiousness that is more typically the focus of commentaries on EU common foreign and security policy and transatlantic relations.

Theorizing Secession: What Should Be the Relationship between the Ideal and the Empirical?

Secession is the withdrawal of a group and its territory from the authority of a state of which it is part (Horowitz 1998: 182). During the Cold War, academic study of secession, as a phenomenon in its own right, was neither widespread nor systematic, even though incidents of it were frequent.1 Its perceived importance increased after 1989, as separatist undertakings claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the globe and led to major international crises, including external military interventions, generating much uncertainty and confusion among both practitioners and students of politics. For more than 20 years now, it has also been a topic of rather spirited debate among political philosophers and normatively inclined scholars of international relations. At the core of the phenomenon lies the question of who has the right to govern whom and in what jurisdictional domain, a question that political philosophers are naturally disposed to tackle.